The Lead

Not long after FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and his liked-minded commissioners voted on Thursday in favor (3-2) of Net Neutrality rules to regulate Internet service providers, the flag dropped on filing lawsuits that will vigorously oppose those new rules. Service providers, such as Comcast, vowed to file lawsuits and work with Congress against reclassifying broadband service as a public utility.

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Video blackouts are a real buzz kill for those tryptophan-induced Thanksgiving comas, so on that note CBS and Dish Network agreed to extend their retransmission talks for the second time. The two sides had settled on a five-day extension on Nov. 20 before the second extension was announced Tuesday night.

Amazon announced that its Fire TV Stick has started shipping today, and said that the stick was its fastest selling Amazon device ever. But it looks as though you’ll have to wait until after the holidays to get your hands on one. Last month Amazon announced it was taking on Chromecast and Roku, among others, with its Fire TV Stick, which provides instant access to movies, TV shows, music, photos, apps, and games.

With their $45 billion merger making the regulatory rounds, the last thing Comcast and Time Warner Cable needed was a very public black eye in American Customer Satisfaction Index survey (ACSI), which was released yesterday. To recap, Time Warner Cable finished dead last in customer satisfaction for both its video and data services while Comcast was second to last in the same catagories in the survey.

Pi Telecom and RGB have integrated the former's MediaStage family of products with the latter's software-based encoding. The solution has already been deployed with Megafon, one of Russia's largest mobile operators, to deliver more than 200 live channels and a range of services.

Dish, as many expected, bought all the licenses available. It has not stated its intentions for the spectrum, but using it for broadband connectivity is a possibility. The company is currently working with Sprint to deploy fixed mobile broadband on a trial basis in Corpus Christi. The trial is scheduled for later this year.

While Comcast announced last month that it would open up a separate, public Wi-Fi network on customers’ home gateways, Liberty Global’s UPC Netherlands also has second SSIDs enabled. Since most of UPC’s cable plant is underground, it needed to find another way to turn on more Wi-Fi hotspots.

While Wi-Fi has cemented itself as the go-to strategy for enabling mobile broadband, there’s bigger and better technology on the horizon. Tom Nagel, Comcast’s senior vice president of business development, would like to add a couple of things to his Wi-Fi playlist.

It was a busy week for Aereo, including comments that emerged from broadcasters at the NAB conference in Las Vegas. Aereo’s business model is a direct threat to broadcasters, but if it emerges victorious in court it could be beneficial to some cable operators. One cable operator executive said that Aereo’s use case was “more of an opportunity than a threat for the MSOs.”

Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt said on a fourth-quarter and year-end earnings conference call that the nation’s second-largest cable operator would continue to take a hard look at channels that don’t add value to its video packages. TWC cut the arts and entertainment channel Ovation from its lineup last month.

Citing the cost of travel and the goal of maximizing members’ time and the organization’s efficiency, the STCE board of directors is currently evaluating a virtual version of the Canadian Summit for this year while looking at the timing, location and format for 2014 and beyond.

According to Needham and Co. analyst Richard Valera, Arris stands to triple its sales and double its EPS while adding $2 billion in debt. All well and good, but how Arris goes about executing its merger strategy with the much larger Motorola Home assets remains a work in progress.

Comcast has started a phased deployment of HD digital transport adapters (HD DTAs) in subscribers’ homes ahead of ultimately having the devices across its entire footprint. HD DTAs allow customers to access HD signals without the frills of VOD, PPV, etc.

There’s no doubt that Comcast’s Reference Design Kit (RDK) initiative has picked up a lot of steam this year, and that should continue with the RDK Developers Community Conference, which is hosted by Time Warner Cable and Comcast. The conference is an important next step for the RDK.

Time Warner Cable CEO Glenn Britt started out the operator’s third-quarter earnings call by thanking his employees for their work before and after Hurricane Sandy, along with a brief update on the storm damages. Britt said Time Warner Cable was still evaluating Hurricane Sandy’s impact.

With the fall TV season underway, Comcast issued a press release touting its TV Everywhere capabilities, which now includes a Web portal just for the fall shows, but what was notable in the release was that so far this year, Comcast said its Xfinity TV customers have already watched and streamed approximately 1.5 billion TV Everywhere shows across on-demand, online and apps.

NBCUniversal delivered more than 100 million video streams during the recent London Olympic Games, and the almost across-the-board coverage of the events further underscored the value of TV Everywhere services.